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Sydney Morning Herald, May 10, 2013
Reviewed By Peter McCallum
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
City Recital Hall, May 8
The Brandenburg Orchestra under conductor Paul Dyer pulled together a small but splendid choir of about 30 singers and some much-loved soloists, who joined its standing orchestra to create a vivid, cohesive and complex sound for Mozart’s Mass in C minor (”The Great”).
The opening Kyrie for choir and orchestra was measured and majestic, and the ensuing Christe mellifluous. As the soprano soloist in this movement, Sarah Macliver, as always, sang with a line of flowing gold.
Although the broad tempo could, at times, have tolerated more forward movement in the third section, the overall impact was weighty and monumental.
Mezzo soprano Fiona Campbell suavely navigated the wide contrasts of range and dramatic rhetorical leaps that Mozart wrote in the Laudamus Te, apparently to display the talents
of his new
wife Constanza.
A highlight of the Gloria section was the Qui Tollis movement, with its gripping and tense choral sound against jagged string motives and sudden quiet shifts and chromatic sighs. In the imposing chorus and fugue that concludes the Gloria section of the Mass, the choir created a polyphony of magnificent clarity.
The first half, by contrast, was fragmented – a string of Mozart chocolates joined together by sugary words spoken by Macliver and Campbell.
Of greatest interest were the duet and the trio for basset horns, a clarinet-like instrument from the 18th century with a woody tone, revived today primarily to play the music Mozart wrote for it. The first movement of Eine kleine Nachtmusik was played with a smug insistence on observing Mozart’s repeat markings, no doubt for the benefit of those to whom it is unfamiliar.
Dyer played the keyboard part of the slow movement of the Violin and Piano Sonata, K. 296, while violinist Brendan Joyce dusted the piano (I am not making this up). Least effective was the Adagio from the Serenade in B flat K 361 (the ”Gran Partitia”) for winds.
Before interval came a balanced reading of the motet Ave Verum Corpus, which went some way to making amends like a quick confession before Mass.
